And everyone is welcome - whether you're an enlightened meditator who reads A Course In Miracles for fun, or you think the Dalai Lama lives in London Zoo - the only criteria to join this club is an open heart and an inquisitive mind.

Our aim is to help demystify the self-help sector, celebrate all that's great about it, and prove that working on yourself doesn't need to be scary or weird.

Because we believe that we can all benefit from a bit of self-reflection and group love, whatever's going on in life right now.

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Founder Toni Jones is a freelance writer and producer based in west London, where she will be hosting regular meetups and author events.

She embraced self-help after leaving a full-time career in journalism at the age of 35 gave her time for introspection and self-analysis for the first time, well, ever, and she wasn't sure she liked what she saw...

Toni’s story

"I found self-help at the same time as many thousands before me, at crisis point. On the outside life was good, there was no obvious trauma or drama to cope with, I was a busy and successful woman with everything going for me.

"But inside I was shattered, and lonely, and sometimes really sad, and these feelings were manifesting themselves in careless and increasingly self-destructive behaviour that with hindsight I can see was a big fat cliched cry for help.

"I didn't know why I felt like this. That's still a 'work in progress'. But I did know that I was tired of the relentless wheel of 'work hard and play harder' that I had created for myself and I needed to get off.

"Leaving my full-time job as an editor was the first step in my 'journey' towards self-awareness and self-love. And it was also the hardest as I had spent over ten years grafting to create a media career in some of the world's largest and toughest news publications.

"My job as a journalist defined me, working for big-name publications validated me, and it definitely kept me way too busy to think about anything that really mattered. Like why I needed external validation anyway.

"And you don't have to be Freud to work out that's probably why I chose this career path in the first place. Being too busy to think can seem like an excellent strategy when, left to your own devices, what you think is mostly that you are not important or interesting or ever quite 'enough'.

Toni Jones

Shelf Help Founder

"Abandoning the comfort of a punishing but familiar full-time job to go solo was terrifying. Who was I, with no title, no company, no team, no boss and no pay check to endorse me? Ultimately I knew that I was doing the right thing giving myself time to pause, but rather than enjoying this QT out of the rat race I felt even more lost than before.

"Trying to make friends with myself after decades of neglect was tough, and I soon started to struggle with lots of new and unfamiliar feelings, thinking that it would be much easier to abandon project TJ, rebury everything, ignore any glimmers of insight and go back to the Company/the pub/being too busy to care.

"And then along came Paul McKenna. An unlikely guru? Possibly. But when the pupil is ready the teacher appears and I was obviously ready for something (anything!) when his book ‘Change Your Life in Seven Days’ fell (jumped?) on the floor in front of me in the local Oxfam.

"Self-help isn't an instant fix, and it took me over a year to read that book about changing your life in seven days, because the concepts in it - mastering your emotions, running your own brain, learning self-confidence, creating your own reality - were so new to me (I'm still working on a couple of them several years later). Before then I'd never spent any time really looking at my behaviour, or focusing on my thoughts or emotions. I didn't think I really had many emotions (lol - I've since discovered I was very wrong about that).

Awareness is the greatest agent for change.

— Eckhart Tolle

"The first question posed in the book is actually really simple: 'What would it be like if you woke up one morning and a miracle had happened - your life had become exactly what you wanted it to be?'

"But I didn’t know the answer. What was my dream life? What did the best future version of me look like? How was I planning to get there? No clue! And not knowing the answer led to me to start questioning everything, about myself, my life, my childhood, my choices, and all the experiences that had shaped me into this person who didn't even know what made her happy anymore.

"This first journey into self-analysis was uncomfortable, fascinating, painful and enlightening all at the same time. And when I (finally!) finished that Paul McKenna book the self-help seed had been well and truly planted.

"Since then I have become a card-carrying member of the self-development tribe, devouring everything from soothing Louise Hay affirmations to mind-blowing Quantum Theory tomes in my quest for a bit more peace and self-awareness.

"Self-help has (and does) make me laugh, cry, cringe and often ask WTF?! Yes there is a some pseudo-science and properly naff stuff out there, but there's also so much incredible inspiration, motivation and insight too.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

— Albert Einstein

"Some of the books I have read in the last few years have fundamentally changed me forever. And once I plucked up the courage to talk to my friends about my experiences I learned that some of them were having similar struggles, realisations and breakthroughs, and it was brilliant to be able to finally share fears and feelings, as well as 'out-there' book recommendations with people who got it and - even better - got me.

"I still work hard, sometimes. And I still play hard, sometimes. And in between I am working on cultivating some inner peace and quiet and rescuing myself from myself, with the help of some magical books and magical people (shout out to my life-saving therapist, my amazing and kind husband, and my brilliant crew of friends).

"And that is the aim of Shelf Help, to be a platform to bring together magical books and magical people (because we're all a bit magic) based on principles of kindness, confidentiality and no judgement, to take the stigma out of self-help, and to create a brilliant, empowering community that can really make a difference to its' members lives.

"Thanks for being here."

As a writer, editor and producer Toni's work has appeared in The Telegraph, The Times, The Daily Mail, MailOnline, The Sun, The Evening Standard, Grazia, InStyle, Stella, BBC, The Huffington Post, The New York Post, The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard Magazine.